Muse: July Preview

First on the July agenda for North Coast Repertory Theatre is keeping the lights on. In an already challenging economy for local theatres, NCRT urgently needs to replace lighting equipment that’s 40 years old. So the first of two fundraisers this month is Keepin’ the Lights On, a musical revue featuring show tunes performed by lights-out singers Katy Curtis, Evan Needham, Nanette Voss, Craig Waldvogel and Andrea Zvaleko, with musical accompaniment by Laura Welch. It’s on for two nights, Friday and Saturday, July 1 and 2 at 8 p.m. in the North Coast Rep theatre. Suggested donation is five bucks.

Next up at Redwood Curtain is Kimberly Akimbo by David Lindsay-Abaire, a play that puts the ultimate spin on growing up fast. It’s centered on a New Jersey teenager with a suspect family and a rare condition that causes her to speed rapidly to old age.

It’s Redwood Curtain’ s third Lindsay-Abaire play. “This playwright’s works are a perfect match for our uniquely twisted sense of humor,” said Artistic Director Clint Rebik. Adina Lawson plays Kimberly, with James Hitchcock, Elisa Abelleira, Peggy Metzger and Kody Dennis. Cassandra Hesseltine directs.

 One reviewer wrote that this play “buzzes along” like a balloon “tied to a firecracker”--which may make it perfect for an early July opening. Kimberly Akimbo previews at Redwood Curtain on Thursday and Friday July 7 and 8, with the official opening (and reception) on Saturday July 9 at 8 p.m. Performances continue Thursdays to Saturdays through July 30. Thursdays are cheap date nights. There’s one Sunday matinee, on July 24 at 2 p.m. Information at www.redwoodcurtain.com.

 The Mad River Festival in Blue Lake continues in July with A Suicide Note from a Cockroach, a circus theatre spectacle performed by Pelu’ Theatre, a company based in Portland but rooted in Puerto Rico. Billed as putting a comic twist on being an immigrant in a U.S. city, it’s presented in Dell’Arte’s Carlo Theatre July 7-10 at 8 p.m.

Also as part of this year’s Fest, the Dell’Arte production of Three Trees (with Joe Krienke, Stephanie Thompson and Lauren Wilson as wartime clowns) first staged in January, returns for four performances, July 14-17 at 8 p.m. in the Carlo. Information for both shows at www.dellarte.com, with reservations at 668-5663 ext. 20.

 Near month’s end, North Coast Rep opens The Kitchen Wives, a comedy by Caroline Smith that follows cable-access cooking co-hostesses who are old enough to know better, but hate each other anyway. Directed by Carol Escobar, it features Kathleen Marshall, Laura Rose, Daniel Kennedy and George Szabo. Opening night is Thursday, July 28, with weekend performances through August 20.

 NCRT’s second fundraiser is a few nights earlier, at the Blue Lake Casino’s Sapphire Palace on Saturday, July 23: cocktails at 6 p.m., dinner at 7, a variety show at 8, plus $10 in Casino Blue Bucks for a $40 donation, with proceeds again going to new lighting equipment.  For reservations to the play (The Kitchen Wives) and/or the fundraiser (Let There Be Light) call 442-NCRT (6278). www.ncrt.net.

 And what would summer be without summer camp? (Personally I’m looking for a Hogwarts camp that takes so-called adults.) But for actual children, Redwood Curtain Conservatory runs a youth summer day camp at the theatre, Mondays through Fridays, July 25-August 5. There are sessions for ages 6-10 (“Imagination and Play, an Introduction to Theatre”), and 11 to 14 (“Stage Presence, Performing from the Start.”) The instructor is Molly Armstrong.

 Up in Ashland at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, To Kill A Mockingbird closes on July 2, but opening on July 20 in the Bowmer Theatre is The African Company Presents Richard III, an historical drama about a company of free black actors in 1820s Manhattan who rehearse Richard III at night, for an opening that clashes with an established theatre’s production. Check www.osfashland.org for all the month’s choices.

Revival

How do you make an old play new again? Moving the era of a Shakespeare play, especially closer to our own time, has become a strategy so common that it now seems reflexive, as predictable as the movement of a knee tapped with a hammer. Following the screen success of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of a few years ago featured teens in prep school uniforms carrying cell phones. But such elements depend on surprise and especially wit, as well as relevance, and their effects wear off quickly. Some work better on screen, but not always even there (Almereyda's postmodern Hamlet with Ethan Hawke was less successful.)

Sometimes, changing the period can be illuminating, but this depends on an original, relevant and brilliantly applied vision. However, there are a couple of other ways to revive older plays and make them more relevant to contemporary audiences.

One way--which is the essential way--is to play it honestly. The most difficult task for actors in Shakespeare and other well-known plays is to convince the audience that the characters are experiencing these events for the first time--that they don't know what happens next. Actors enact emotion, and this is the core of both the performance and the audience response. If the production, and particularly the actors, can make it real, the audience will experience it as new and relevant.

In general, a production that finds the vitality in the play can't help but to make it relevant to the times, because it will engage an audience living in these times. Playwright Terrence McNally spoke recently about the process of creating Ragtime, The Musical (he wrote the script), first produced on Broadway in 1998 and revived there last year, just nine years after the original production closed. He made this perceptive comment (published in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of The Dramatist) about the revival: " Everything will be the same as before but everything will be different, too. That's because we have a different country than when Ragtime [the novel by E.L. Doctorow] was published and Ragtime, The Musical premiered. If Ragtime seems different to you this time around it's not because we've re-written it. It's because this is a society that has re-written itself."

Pulitzer

The 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to Lynn Nottage (top photo) for her play, Ruined (bottom photo, from the Manhattan Theatre Club production), a play about the brutalizing of women during a decade of war in the Congo, modeled on Brecht's Mother Courage. Nottage and director Kate Whoriskey visited refugee camps in Uganda, Rwanda and other parts of Africa to base this play on reality. In an article in the March American Theatre magazine by Randy Gener, Nottage said, "You can't reconcile the incredible beauty and gentleness of the culture with the horror and the suffering. The play is about how they coexist." Among her other plays, Nottage wrote Intimate Apparel which was produced a few seasons ago at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Here's my brief review:

Intimate Apparel by contemporary playwright Lynn Nottage is set in early twentieth century New York, and concerns a modest young African American seamstress (played by Gwendolyn Mulamba) whose correspondence with a man from Barbados while he is laboring on the Panama Canal (Erik LaRay Harvey) leads to marriage. Their lives intersect with a wealthy and lonely white socialite (Terri McMahon), a ragtime piano-playing prostitute (Tiffany Adams), a Jewish cloth merchant (Gregory Linington,) and a maternal landlady (Perri Gaffney.)

 This drama (directed by Timothy Bond) uses graceful language, generous acting and expressive staging (with scenic design by Richard Hay) to portray complicated and often warm relationships, in an historical context in which we see class, race, ethnicity, gender roles, economics and even technology influencing the fates of these characters. The audience in the 600-seat Angus Bowmer Theatre were spellbound, and audibly got the main character’s final secret, expressed in a single gesture.

 Lynn Nottage is a fast-rising playwright, and Intimate Apparel is a solidly built and subtle play. 

Our Town, Our Country

Frank Rich has led two lives at the New York Times. He's currently a current affairs columnist, and before that he was the chief drama critic. (He's had even more jobs outside that paper--he was a movie critic for Time Magazine, and before that for New Times magazine, where he was also an editor: my editor, in fact.) The two roads that diverged in a country wood also met there, and his two lives also occasionally touch in an overt way.

This Sunday was one of those times, when he wrote about Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and our country. He cites two new productions, in Chicago and New York (there was another up in Ashland last season that unfortunately I didn't get to see), and observes: "You can see why there’s a spike in the “Our Town” market. Once again its astringent distillation of life and death in the fictional early-20th-century town of Grover’s Corners, N.H., is desperately needed to help strip away “layers and layers of nonsense” so Americans can remember who we are — and how lost we got in the boom before our bust."

Given the role that theatre plays in this culture, it may take an ex-drama critic to make the connection between new productions of a classic play and how that play resonates and illuminates the moment in a new way. But given the openness that many people in theatre audiences take to the plays they see, I believe this connection is made pretty often by audiences, if not journalists.

I am also delighted that Wilder's play is being revived. Thonrton Wilder has been too easily dismissed for too long. I'd like to see a new production of The Skin of Our Teeth (his other Pulitzer Prize winner) as well. Wilder wrote plays from the 1920s to 1960. He wrote fiction into the 1970s. That's a lot of American history. It's time to see him again, anew.

Here's are reviews of the Chicago production and the New York production of Our Town.

The updated edition of the New Cambridge Shakespeare volume on Lear is a treasure trove of information on past productions and interpretations, as well as textual analysis and the text itself, with those annotations that enrich a reading beyond price.

The history of the text is crazed and convoluted, especially since several versions from Shakespeare's time exist (the Quarto and the Folio versions, plus variations), so that there seems to be no definitive text--just combinations that are more or less accepted for publication and performance.

And then there was the now infamous Tate version, cobbled together from Shakespeare versions plus additional verses, scenes and even characters, with that happy ending. That Lear lives to reign again, followed after his death by Cordelia, was actually how the old story went, the one that Shakespeare adapted and was known to the audiences of his time. That he kills them both was a rude if very theatrical shock to them, just in terms of what they expected.

In its summary of notable productions, the Cambridge volume (edited by Jay L. Halio) devotes a paragraph to the 2004 King Lear at OSF in Ashland, directed by James Edmondson, who had played the role at OSF in 1997. Kenneth Albers played Lear in 2004. Quoting liberally from Bill Varble's review in the Medford Mail Tribune, it says: "Together they decided to examine the 'personal' tragedy of King Lear--'Lear as a noble and gifted ruler who in his old age has become so self-righteous, imperious and obstinate that he creates the weapons of his own destruction.' Albers performed Lear's descent into madness as a 'portrayal of the tricks an aging mind plays, a Shakespearean examination of early Alzheimer's disease within the context of political and familial disaster.' As the storm echoes his descent into madness, Lear becomes increasingly sane and humane. The ending of the play was uncompromising--no redemption but 'splendor in the ashes...the kind of Shakespeare we need. It has its effect honestly, sans tricks or flash, and so is deeply satisfying.'"

I personally didn't see this OSF production. And I'm not sure from this description whether I would have liked it. I'm a bit leery of a Lear that gets all Alzheimery--it could be a little too easy and pop culturish. I'm not sure about splendor in the ashes either, but as I say, I didn't see it.

[continued after photos]

The Winter's Tale, More on

1. The HSU production of The Winter's Tale was reviewed--astoundingly--in the Lumberjack, the HSU student newspaper that usually does its best to ignore all theatre, dance and musical events involving HSU students. "Just like in high school, Shakespeare's language got in the way of a good time," the Jack review begins, and soon refers to its "nearly foreign words."  So much for the moron in "more on."  Of course, there are now-obscure words in Shakespeare, but the language in this play is not especially difficult.  There's just a lot of it,  which is one problem modern audiences are likely to have in following it.  It's a good reason to see and hear these plays as many times as possible, for each production can yield a greater appreciation for the words and the language, as well as the plays.

2. Here's my brief review from 2006 of that season's Oregon Shakespeare Festival production, directed by OSF artistic director, Libby Appel:

 It begins with a burst of color, music and motion—that (thanks to the excellent sound system as well as the staging) creates the mood in the audience that’s the mood of the characters as we first see them. The court of the mythical Sicilia is joyful at the reunion of its King with his childhood friend, now King of the equally mythical Bohemia.

 Yet in the midst of revelry a single light flashes on the face of the King as he reveals his paranoid fantasies about his friend and his wife, Queen Hermione. A tragic course is set, with murderous plots, betrayals and death. But this course is broken and even reversed, in part by intervention of the gods, and in part by love.

 This late play has some of the earth-magical qualities of The Tempest, references to the tradition of Greek tragedy, and echoes of many of Shakespeare’s previous plays. This production features powerful performances by Miriam A. Laube as Hermione and William Langan as King Leontes, and performances by the entire cast that make this story crystal clear as well as affecting and funny, played against the apparently simple but highly evocative scenery of Rachel Hauck.

 Also featured is Mark Murphey as the trickster god Autolycus, whose performance delightfully proves that physical comedy can serve a substantive text, both as relief and as integral to the story.

Shakespeare’s plays are timeless partly because they speak in different ways to every time, and in this one I was struck by how those who served this king felt honor-bound to dissuade him from his disastrous course. Too bad they aren’t serving in the non-mythical Washington.

3.  Background on The Winter's Tale that I wrote and posted at HSU Stage:

“All roads lead to Shakespeare… He is the very center of a literary education in our language. When we say drama, we mean Shakespeare and the rest.”

Eric Bentley
In Search of Theater

In 1592, a hack writer called Robert Greene complained in print about a young playwright named Shakespeare. Greene called him an “upstart crow,” and accused him of plagiarism.

Some eighteen years later, with Greene safely dead, Shakespeare appropriated the plot of Greene’s most popular prose romance (“Pandosto”) and transformed it into the stage romance, The Winter’s Tale.

Shakespeare’s title meant a kind of “old wives tale,” a made-up story. Perhaps the country folk of England had a tradition like some Native American tribes, of telling stories around the fire in the winter—stories with fantastic elements, that might be fables and teaching stories as well.

The Winter’s Tale was the last play that claims Shakespeare as sole author, except for one more: The Tempest. Though this play is not frequently performed, it contains some of Shakespeare’s most theatrical moments, including spectacles, song and dance, and the very theatrical ending.

Like The Tempest and the earlier As You Like It, this play examines the contrasts of court and countryside, rich nobles and poor country folk, as well as art and nature, magic and real life. Shakespeare suggests ways in which these opposites can be reconciled, as in the character of Perdita, the daughter of noble birth who is raised by shepherds, and who observes that the same sun shines on palace and cottage alike.

“In this play the human and the natural come together," writes Shakespeare biographer Peter Ackroyd, "in the great ongoing rhythm of life itself.”

“The Winter’s Tale conveys more persuasively than any previous work the sustained illusion that the world of dramatic romance is directly related to the world in which we live. Thus in Leontes Shakespeare embodies a new Everyman figure, the tragic king who can be redeemed in this life through penitence and love and the renewal that time brings.” --Norman Rabkin, "Shakespeare and the Common Understanding"

“The Winter’s Tale communicates a joy new in Shakespeare by suggesting the possibility of grace and innocence in a world which presents every appearance of being able to overthrow them.”--Norman Rabkin: "Shakespeare and the Common Understanding."

Limitations of Tragedy Continued

The Clay Cart suggests limitations of western drama

Recently I reviewed a Dell' Arte School's MFA Ensemble production, Between Two Winters, which was the outcome of their study of classic tragedy.  I also reviewed a production currently at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, called The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. While it isn't itself a tragedy, it had a lot to say about tragedy as a necessary reflection of the human condition. I also referred back to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of the Sanskrit play, The Clay Cart.  I ended it suggesting that tragedy might be less a category based on human nature than on the view of a particular culture in a particular time and place, though expressed so well in a form of drama.

I quoted a literary scholar on this, but I might also mention historian of religion Karen Armstrong who also suggests that this era of Greek drama came after a long period of awful times in that part of the world.

Here's a little more of what I was thinking... Tragedy is often considered the apex and greatest form of our drama, and in a sense of our culture. The idea of the hero with a tragic flaw, undone by hubris, fated to fall from the heights, does seem to express or at least fit well with many other central notions of western culture. The fatal flaw is like original sin, hubris is offending the jealous God. There's perhaps a bit of Social Darwinism--even the mighty fall because the fatal flaw makes them unfit in the continual struggle for survival.

But what if--as van Buitenen suggests--Greek tragedy is not the consummate form against which every other theatrical form from every other culture is measured? What if it really expressed a particular culture--western culture--or even more particularly, the cultural beliefs of ancient Greece? And so it may not be humanity's best expression of the universal human condition: the way things are. Maybe just the way the Greeks thought things are. Maybe just one way things can be. And maybe the ideas that seem to fit so comfortably with tragedy--like humanity as innately sinful (as some western religions say) or humanity as predominantly selfish (dominated by selfish genes) as some western science emphasizes--maybe they are culture-bound as well, and not the whole human story?

Because we do get the sense from our culture that human nature is either damned by Divine design or evolution to accentuate cruelty, ambition, selfishness and violence. Of which humankind certainly provides many examples, which our dramas emphasize in form and content.

But Sanskrit drama doesn't do Greek tragedy, nor does it emphasize the survival of the most selfish, nor does it find drama only in people being cruel to each other. As I wrote in the earlier review: "The Clay Cart is not a religious play; the OSF program describes it as a social comedy. But comparing this play to western dramas and comedies, the most revealing and ultimately inspiring difference to me was the kind of conflict that creates the dramatic action. Yes, there is a villain (though he’s played as a ridiculous figure from the start) and human foibles that lead to complications, but the overall motives are most often generosity, loyalty, empathy and love."

I am certainly no expert on Sanskrit drama, but I wrote about my experience of that play, and found scholarly support. The (Little) Clay Cart, wrote one of its translators, is about "a man of heart" representing India's "classical aesthetic culture." The essence of his character is in how he expresses "moral duty" and "sympathetic generosity." The outcome: "The righteous man may suffer, but in the end he is stronger than the wicked, who is really a fool." He represents virtue, because "he loves his friends and forgives his enemies."

In this sense, it is exemplary drama, which can be soporific, and is certainly not the whole human story. But then, neither is tragedy. Wouldn't we be better off with a little more balance in our drama-- new interpretations of what how virtue is expressed, what it means, what it costs but what its rewards can be--in our own culture?

For after all, our science is showing that altruism is just as natural as selfishness, that animals exhibit cooperation and sharing as well as competition--if we only allow ourselves to see it. And at least in practice, our religious traditions include encouraging compassion, and modelling it. So can't our theatre produce drama (and not just the bipolar of tragedy and comedy) to reflect this? Because we're going to have to achieve a balance--to face our flaws but emphasize our ability to get beyond them, to keep trying--if we're going to be up to the challenges of the future.

To be fair, this is not precisely van Buitenen's point, in his introduction to the translation that OSF uses of The Little Clay Cart. For example, he sets the Greek idea of fate against the Hindu idea of transmigration of the soul into the next generation, making "any single life an episode in a far longer chain. No single life makes ultimate sense in itself; the chain of life does."

Still, his basic point about the culture-bound concept of tragedy allows for mine. Here's more of that passage: "This 'absense of tragedy' [in Sanskrit drama] is sometimes pointed to with a mildly accusing finger, as though any theatre worth the name should have it. Apologists then point out that India was 'prevented' from developing true tragedy by the underlying climate of its thought. This argument takes for granted that tragedy is an almost natural expression of any culture. But why not argue that Greek tragedy constitutes the exception, not the rule, and that it presupposes a very specific notion of moira (fate) that was peculiarly Greek?"

I also must confess that my point was also influenced by Daniel Mendelsohn's lovely essay in the New York Review of Books on the revival of the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha, which not entirely coincidentally, is largely about the hero of 20th century India, Gandhi (although it covers mostly his earlier years in South Africa, where he developed his methods of passive resistance.) The essay begins:

Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas. Like the Greek tragedies that the sixteenth-century Venetian inventors of opera sought to recreate, Western musical drama has tended to be preoccupied with the darker extremes of human emotions: excessive passion and wild jealousy, smoldering resentment and implacable rage. These, after all, are the emotions that spark the kinds of actions—adultery, betrayal, revenge, murder—that make for gripping drama. Unpleasant as they may be in real life, such actions are essential to the Western idea of theater itself, in which the very notion of plot is deeply connected to difficulties, problems, disasters...[So] When we go to the theater, we want to see characters doing things. Bad things, preferably."

He finds in the work of Philip Glass another approach, which is not tragedy and probably to many people isn't even drama, or opera. But it is drama of a sort, it is theatre, and Mendelsohn finds it beautiful. And in beauty, is there not something of truth? In the end, tragedy may cause pity and terror. But it doesn't exactly inspire hope. Not only do we need that, but there is plenty in the world and in human nature that's good. To show how people can accentuate that, to show those possibilities, is as human and can be as artful as pushing the easier buttons of fight-or-flight--the reactions that could well be the fatal flaw of tragedy.

The Clay Cart at OSF

Vasantasenā, (Miriam A. Laube, left) dances for Chārudatta (Cristofer Jean, right) as Maitreya (Michael J. Hume) looks on, in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of The Clay Cart. Photo: David Cooper.

The Clay Cart Review

With clouds of incense rising above them, the large cast in colorful costumes is arrayed in a circle. They sit on cushions and stand under lanterns, chanting and singing in a golden light. The opening of The Clay Cart, now in repertory at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, promises an exotic experience from ancient India.

But once the play begins, and those long difficult character names in the program are transformed into recognizable musical sound, audiences are quickly caught up in a story filled with elements familiar from western drama, particularly Shakespeare: star-crossed lovers, a hero down on his luck, political intrigue and revolution, a sardonic fool, a dangerous villain, high-born hypocrites and noble-spirited scamps, an articulate criminal with professional pride. There are mistaken identities, sudden transformations, reversals of fortune, coincidence, violence, melodrama and farce. The plot involves stolen jewels, a pearl necklace, gamblers, a murder trial, and incidentally, a little clay cart.

There’s wit that contemporary Americans can appreciate in this 1960s translation and abridgement of a play that’s something like two thousand year old. The audience I saw it with particularly liked this one: “Wisdom comes naturally to women, but men have to be taught with books.”

The OSF production emphasizes these shared elements. Though Miriam Laube in the major role of the courtesan Vastantasena incorporates some ritual movements from Sanskrit theatre, the acting styles are largely familiar, and delightfully accomplished. Fluid staging, a simple but impressive set (built around and within that circle), gorgeous lighting—from that symbolic golden glow to the pale dawn and the turquoise sky before a storm—all have the signature OSF quality. If the show errs, it’s towards a little too much Broadway gloss. Still, this play comes from a theatrical tradition that is largely unknown today, even in India.

On April 5, 1965 the Beatles were filming an Indian restaurant scene for their second feature film, Help! Between takes, George Harrison picked up a strange stringed instrument used by one of the musicians supposedly playing for customers. It was a sitar. Within a few years, Harrison’s relationship with Ravi Shankar, and the Beatles’ trip to learn meditation in India brought traditional Indian music and ideas into western popular culture in a very big way. After many more inroads since, American audiences can more comfortably explore the cultural differences and similarities.

Of course there had been forays before. Writers like Somerset Maugham described Hindu ideas, and Sanskrit drama influenced western playwrights like Brecht and Thorton Wilder. Probably the first U.S. production of The Little Clay Cart (as this play is usually called) was the 1924 season-opener at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. That production, and most of the few since, tried to honor the strictures of Sanskrit drama, including the 1994 staging at Pomona College in southern California. Around that time, Bill Rauch created a looser adaptation with his Cornerstone Theatre Company in Los Angeles (called The Toy Truck.) Now OSF’s new Artistic Director, Rauch has directed a production that’s somewhere in between: pretty faithful to the text, and arguably to the spirit of Sanskrit drama, as well as to at least some of the style.

That style is codified in one of the holy books of the Hindu religion and philosophy: the fifth Veda, devoted entirely to all aspects of drama. That’s how important drama was, to all segments of society. Vocabularies of movement and expression, types of dramas and how plays were to unfold, etc. were all proscribed, though as a living art, Sanskrit theatre continued to invent and change. But remnants in Bollywood films are mostly what remains in Indian popular culture.

The OSF production uses music, dance, masks and movement, and the staging suggests the settings rather than depicting them—all consistent with Sanskrit styles. The story reveals some social structures ostensibly different from ours, notably concerning marriage (but that’s also true of Shakespeare to some extent.) Still, audiences will find relevance to our current class divides, political struggles, and even relationship complications.

The Clay Cart is not a religious play; the OSF program describes it as a social comedy. But comparing this play to western dramas and comedies, the most revealing and ultimately inspiring difference to me was the kind of conflict that creates the dramatic action. Yes, there is a villain (though he’s played as a ridiculous figure from the start) and human foibles that lead to complications, but the overall motives are most often generosity, loyalty, empathy and love. As one character proclaims: “If a man sets his mind on virtue,/There is nothing he may not dare.”

It was an inspired idea to bring The Clay Cart to OSF, and this funny, moving, vibrant production has to be among the highlights of the season.

Nature of Tragedy: Between Two Winters, Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler

Between Two Winters returned to the Carlo Theatre stage last weekend not as an encore so much as an iteration—a tryout of changes before its upcoming weekend at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

Tasked with creating and performing a Aristotelian tragedy by adapting a story from the news, the Dell’Arte School’s MFA Ensemble of second-year students continued to refine this piece beyond its April premiere. Though they did some rewriting, added a character (and their teacher, Ronlin Foreman, is now directing) the play’s basic story is the same: After the first Gulf War in 1991, the mayor of a small Montana town goes to Kuwait ostensibly to honor a soldier from her town for his heroics in saving lives during the attempts to put out the oil fires set by retreating Iraqis, but really to use the photo op with a TV crew filming it to advance her campaign for the Senate.

 It turns out that the soldier had raped her 20 years before, and her daughter—who is also there—is the child resulting from that rape. The news story that was the starting point involved a man confessing to a rape some 20 years later, and asking forgiveness of the woman he raped. But she refused, and insisted he be prosecuted.

 The situation in Between Two Winters is somewhat different: the soldier (Sergeant Mulligan) was Mayor Catherine Tuttle’s neighbor in their childhoods, and it was a “date rape,” when he returned from Vietnam. That the audience doesn’t question that an ambitious politician wouldn’t bother learning in advance the name of the soldier she was there to honor is the key to the conceit, and once past that, the confrontations take over.

 Besides Mayor Tuttle (played by Norah Sadavd), her daughter Naomi (Liza Bielby) and Sgt. Mulligan (Matt Walley), also present are the TV news team and a campaign consultant (Ida Fugli, Barney Baggett, Jamie Van Camp, Adam Curvin and Brian Moore).  The news crew is a kind of Greek chorus, at first witnessing but as the story unfolding before them trumps the fairly boring story they are there to cover, their role becomes more probing, more questioning.

 The final character is Qazi (Deepal Doshi), a kind of Kuwaiti Tiresias who also represents the war’s victims where it was fought. Stylistically, the movie-of-the-week potential of the story is deflected by some movement and singing, but mostly by this aspect of the media becoming the chorus, and the ritualistic action and language.

 The first part of the play is diffuse and confusing: overlapping dialogue may indicate the chaos of a TV shoot, but it doesn’t help define role and character, especially when the student cast is all of a similar age. But the rest is pretty powerful, as it explores the wounds of war, the chain of brutalities, the sometimes difficult line between justice and revenge. Even the oil fires are explored for metaphor, the explosive secrets surfacing from underground.

Violence and death as well as heroes, flaws and fate appear—the constituents of tragedy—and their ambiguities are offered. There’s too much asserted and suggested in an hour for this to be a fully formed play, but Between Two Winters could be described as a poetic dance of ideas that suggests contemporary tragedy with provocative depth—with more depth than some more elaborate plays with the same general intent even attempt.

 
Five years ago at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Robin Goodrin Nordi as Hedda Gabler shot herself, and the play ended. This season, Robin Goodrin Nordi as Hedda Gabler shoots herself, and the play begins.

 Though both plays were directed by OSF’s new artistic director Bill Rauch, the earlier one was the modern classic by Ibsen, and the play this year is The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, by Oregon playwright Jeff Whitty. I wonder how many times he’s been told he’s a whitty guy? (Now watch the spell-check spoil the pun.) But his play is full of wit and invention, and even if the postmodern jumble sale through time, space and pop culture technique is getting a bit familiar, this show is delightfully theatrical and surprisingly provocative in challenging the whole art-and-audience enterprise.

 Hedda revives to learn that as the heroine of a cherished tragedy, she’s required to stay in character. But in trying to escape the “cul de sac of tragic women,” she sets out on a quest with her faithful companion, Mammy (from Gone With the Wind.)

 Among the other characters she encounters are Medea from Greek mythology and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Also two versions of Jesus. But even more than Mammy (Kimberly Scott) and Hedda’s husband George (Christopher DuVal), the ones who actually become human characters are Patrick (Anthony Heald) and Steven (Jonathan Haugen), living fossils from The Boys in the Band era of flamboyant gay culture.

 Hedda’s odd hero’s journey finally takes her to the Furnace of creation, where fictional characters like her are born, either to become trapped in immortality or to die at some point from lack of popularity, victims of the “genocide of indifference.”

 It’s unusual for a new play to appear on the main stage of the Bowmer Theatre rather than the smaller New Theatre, but this show takes full advantage of the space and its facilities, including the revolving stage. It’s a delightful moment-by-moment ride, that keeps on surprising on one level or another.

 In the end, this play also seems to come down on the side of tragedy as an essential expression and reflection of the human condition. But at other times on this same stage, The Clay Cart and the Sanskrit Theatre’s aim of dramatizing virtue offers a different reading of both art and human potential.

 As editor and scholar van Buitenen suggests, “Why not argue that Greek tragedy constitutes the exception, not the rule, and that it presupposes a very specific notion of moira (fate)…?” And perhaps our arts as well as our science and politics have ignored other possibilities, including those qualities in the world and in ourselves that contribute to more fully accurate images and assessments? Which might provide a balance, even an emphasis necessary for the future of the human enterprise, and the world we tragically threaten? Something to think about, on the way home.

Fences at OSF

Even before Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom made his name on Broadway, playwright August Wilson was intent on avoiding the all-too-common fate of a one-play career. For that second play he also gave himself a specific challenge: to follow the eccentric structure and multiple focus of “Ma Rainey” with a more conventional narrative centered on a single complex character.

 So from experiences and characteristics of his step-father and a near neighbor, and from his own home-run-hitting prowess as a teenager, Wilson created Troy Maxson, a baseball legend in the Negro League kept out of the segregated major leagues until he was too old, so that at the age of 53 in 1957, he works for the city of Pittsburgh collecting garbage.

 The resulting play is Fences, which earned Wilson his first Pulitzer, Tony award and other prizes in 1987, and has been his most popular play ever since (though it was never his favorite.) It’s scheduled for a Broadway revival in the fall, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production is on stage in Ashland now.

 From that first production, this story of a husband and father, his wife, his sons and brother, and their relationships to each other and to their own individuality, was recognized for its universal themes. But the universal is best expressed in the particular—which is one of those truisms that’s often true.

 Certainly Troy Maxson’s story as it is gradually revealed expresses aspects of the African American experience. Yet there are other specifics that resonated for me when I saw the OSF production. I recognized the 1950s, especially among the working/lower middle class, and specifically in Pittsburgh. I grew up some 30 miles from where August Wilson did, at about the same time (we were both pre-teens in 1957.) So when Troy talks about hitting a home run and says, “you can kiss it goodbye,” I recognized the locution of a particular Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster of that era.

 Yet despite our proximities, the worlds of Wilson’s plays were mostly foreign to me—except this one. The terms of the respect Troy demands from his son are specifically familiar from the black family next door, and a boy I grew up with. I heard Troy’s speeches about not wasting time on anything other than preparing to make a living from fathers of many ethnicities, including my own.

 Charles Robinson as Troy Maxson accentuated this familiarity. His relentless insistence on dominating by having the answer for everything, combined with his compact, wiry frame, reminded me of many 1950s fathers. Yet casting him as Troy was risky. Wilson describes the character as “a large man,” and from James Earl Jones on, large men have played him in the first generation of productions while Wilson was alive. This can be important to Troy’s character and the play’s most dramatic moments: the contrast between Troy’s largeness of body and need, and the constrictions he rebels against, while in other ways he continues to bear the fate and the heavy responsibilities that define him.

 It’s also important to the white societal fear and other images associated with big black men. So some of those dramatic moments and motivations seem less than they could be, and while the efficient naturalism of this production has its virtues, there are mythic qualities of Troy that go missing.

 Still, it’s certainly worth taking some trouble to see. Director Leah Gardiner makes full use of the stage to keep the eye involved, as the ear is entranced by Wilson’s trademark stage poetry. Robinson performs very well, as do the other actors (Shona Tucker as his wife, Rose; Josiah Phillips as his friend, Bono; Kevin Kenerly and Cameron Knight as his sons, Lyons and Cory; G. Valmont Thomas as his brother, Gabriel; and Catiana Graham and Dominique Moore alternating as his daughter, Raynell.)

 They speak the rhythms of Wilson’s words, which together with the backyard set by Scott Bradley and lighting by Dawn Chiang—naturalistic and mythic at the same time—create stage magic.

More on "Fences"

Before I saw August Wilson's play, Fences at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival earlier this month, I hadn't seen a production of it nor read it for around a decade. So with other Wilson plays I'd seen and read in recent years more in the forefront of my mind, I experienced this production with a certain innocence. I remembered some parts of the story, but not others. But in most ways, it was a first-time kind of experience. That turned out to be a big part of the experience for me.

So in my review I wrote about it without giving away much of the story, so others could also experience it that way. Deciding how much of the play's story to tell is always a problem. Some people read reviews before they see a play--perhaps to help them decide whether to see it or not. But a lot of people who won't see the play (or at least this production) read the review anyway. So how do you not spoil the story for those who are going, while telling enough of the story to make it an interesting reading experience for those who aren't going? The answer varies according to circumstances, but it's almost always a problem.

A couple of other comments about that column. Doing a cost-benefit analysis on writing columns and reviews is always depressing, but sometimes more than others. Getting review tickets for Oregon Shakespeare Festival productions is one of the perks of this job, and a necessary one, because it offers some perspective on the North Coast theatre I usually see. But otherwise, it's a long (and increasingly costly) drive, it's a couple of nights in a motel, meals and four plays in three days (we usually arrive Thursday for the evening show, see two on Friday and one on Saturday before driving back.) And for all that, the paper pays zilch.

For many columns (which may include reviews/previews of two plays or more) there's time-consuming research. And then of course the job of writing, which often involves being as concise as possible. I thought of all this when I re-read the first paragraph of the Fences review, and realized that it alone represented at least eight hours of reading. There were three facts from three separate sources in one sentence.

In that review, I write about the muscular but not physically large lead actor, and how Wilson noted that Troy Maxson (the lead character) is a large man, and then I speculate on the importance of that largeness. But it was only after I wrote that, that this piece from NPR was brought to my attention. It makes a big point out of the character's largeness. It also contains the one video clip of James Earl Jones' performance that I recall seeing before.

I wish I'd seen him do this play, as well as a subsequent touring production with John Henry Redwood as Troy Maxson. I met John Henry and saw him in other roles (and he was a big man, and a very generous and lovely man, who, like August, died way before his time), as I saw the great Mary Alice, who originated the role of Rose in Fences, in a different play with John Henry. (Courtney Vance, who was the first Cory, is now familiar to just about everybody from his television roles, particularly as the D.A. on Law and Order: Criminal Intent.)

I suppose it's not too much of a tip-off to say that this play is about "love, honor, duty, betrayal," especially since August Wilson said that's what all his plays are about. But from here on, there are SPOILERS, so if you haven't seen Fences and you intend to, maybe this is the place to stop reading.

Troy Maxson reveals a major element of his biography late in the first act, including a crime he committed and the fact that he was imprisoned for it. It's said that August Wilson based this character partly on his stepfather, David Bedford, who married his mother in 1957, the year this play takes place.

It was only after Bedford's death that Wilson learned he had been a high school football star, but black players didn't get scholarships in 1930s Pittsburgh, so he tried to rob a store to get money to go to school. But during the robbery he killed a man, and spent 23 years in prison. The only job he could get when he got out was with the Pittsburgh sewage department. Troy Maxson's story is similar.

August Wilson's relationship with Bedford was difficult, and one area of conflict, as in the play, was over high school football. But while in the play, Troy's conflict with his son Cory is over Cory playing football (and being recruited by a North Carolina college), Wilson's was that he quit his high school team. (I'm not sure his Pittsburgh Central Catholic High School team played my Greensburg Central Catholic High School team when we were both in high school, but if so we might have passed in the night way back then.)

Troy Maxson goes off on the Pittsburgh Pirates for not playing Roberto Clemente because he was Puerto Rican, and this was August's view as well, as he expressed it when we talked about the Pirates of that era. It's true that the now revered Clemente had a tough time his first several years in the 1950s. He complained of various injuries and got a reputation as lazy, which was clearly a racial byproduct. Ironically or not, the Pittsburgh Pirates--in a city that always had a complex attitude towards its black athletes--in 1971 became the first to field an all-black team (including the pitcher) in a World Series. The star of that team and that Series was Roberto Clemente.

Troy Maxson was a Negro League player, and Pittsburgh had two of the best Negro League teams, the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, with Satchel Paige pitching.

Wilson said this play began with an image, of a black man holding a baby, in a collage by the black Pittsburgh artist whose work inspired several of his plays, Romare Bearden. Wilson wanted to portray a black man who felt the responsibility to stay with his family, and who did. He wanted to provide a counter-image to the prevalent stereotype of black men who are absent from their families, and black families without fathers.

The play demonstrates the cost of that, and the personal cost of thwarted ambition and self-expression, not only in Troy but in his wife, Rose, and both of his sons. Troy attributes his infidelity to the need to get beyond his fences of family and failure, though he is otherwise clueless about his projections onto his sons and the costs of thwarting the sports and college ambitions of Cory, or not supporting the musical ambitions of his eldest son, Lyons.

When he began writing Fences, Wilson hadn't quite conceived the idea of writing a cycle of plays set in all the decades of the 20th century. But in what is probably his most personal play in that it reflects his own childhood, he was already being true to the history of the African American family. Troy Maxson stands at the midpoint of the century, and in the middle of so much else.

But though this was August Wilson's most popular play--and the one that assured his career as a playwright--it was not his favorite. As he said in interviews and as he told me, his favorite was the next one he wrote, Joe Turner's Come and Gone. I'm still searching for the interview later in his life when he talked about all his plays. I seem to recall he ranked Gem of the Ocean pretty highly, too.

I haven't mentioned Troy's brother, Gabriel, and I don't say much about him in my review. He is certainly a key figure in the play, as the wounded and addled often are in Wilson's plays. G. Valmont Thomas does a fine job portraying him. But his size and big voice make me wonder what this production might have been like if he had played Troy and Robinson had played Gabriel. That might not have fit the director's vision (or the actors' schedules), but I would have liked to see it.

Robinson was quite compelling in the role, and he fit with other stylistic elements of this production. His interactions with Cory in particular felt real and nuanced, though contemporary audiences might have been more disturbed by the way that James Earl Jones seemed to deliberately humiliate Cory. But his key speech explaining his infidelity didn't have the visceral power it might have had. Nor really did the scene announcing the death of his mistress, or his bringing the baby to Rose. They worked for that audience--including me--mostly because of Wilson's words, I think. But as I wrote in my review, it was an emotional theatrical experience anyway, and I certainly recommend it.

"Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter" at OSF

Gwendolyn Mulamba as Jenny Sutter at OSF

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter Reviewed

My Journal column this week contains a review written by playwright, director, teacher and now drama critic (and also my partner) Margaret Thomas Kelso, of the current Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. I had to edit it for space in print, but not for cyberspace. So here is her full review:

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter, written by Julie Marie Myatt and directed by Jessica Thebus, joins a long line of stories about soldiers returning from war that date back to Homer’s Odyssey. And like Ulysses, Jenny Sutter does not take a direct path home. But instead of Calypso’s island, Iraq war veteran Jenny detours by way of Slab City, California, in her own odyssey to find herself before reconnecting with her family. Unlike Ulysses, she is coming home injured: she suffers from PTSD, survivor’s guilt and an amputated leg. And as a woman, she faces greater expectations to emotionally reunite with her children. The play asks can she heal herself enough to be able to face the rest of the journey home?

Approximately 200,000 women have served in the Iraq so far and more of them have faced hostile fire and resulting injuries than women in the military ever before. How the ravages of war will impact servicewomen (in contrast to civilian women who suffer collateral damage) is still unknown.

The director Jessica Thebus has discovered the perfect tone for the piece: amusing, gritty and without a trace of sentimentality. The performances are all strong with Gwendolyn Mulamba playing an acerbic and ironic Jenny, who grounds the play with her pain and dignity. The rest of the cast are mostly odd ball inhabitants of Slab City, a real location, the remnants of a WWII Marine base at the foot of the Chocolate Mountains where a community of retirees and misfits squat in domiciles ranging from tarps to classic Airstreams. It’s a perfect location for the likes of Jenny and offers the playwright plenty of material for a supporting cast of quirky characters who infuse humor and warmth into the play and Jenny’s life.

Lou, a professional itinerant trying to give up her many addictions , calls Slab City her home base. Kate Mulligan plays Lou with energy and sizzle, becoming an upbeat foil for the laconic Jenny. Other residents of the slabs are Buddy, Lou’s sometimes boyfriend/preacher, skillfully played by David Kelly; Cheryl, Lou’s hairdresser/therapist, believably performed by K.T. Vogt; and Donald, an emotionally damaged cipher whose deft performance by Gregory Linington prevents these characters from sliding into romanticism. Cameron Knight plays Hugo, the bus station’s night shift employee who is the first civilian Jenny meets after discharge.

Richard Hay created a simple set that serves flawlessly while maintaining a bit of magic in the scene transitions that Oregon Shakespeare does so well.. Lynn Jeffries designed costumes that anchor the realistic tone of the play while supporting the character development of the actors. Allen Lee Hughes’s lighting not only supports the action and mood of the play but creates locales, especially the hospital setting at the opening of the play.

The only shortcoming of the production were several extended lifeless scenes. The first was very early in the play when Jenny changes from her marine fatigues into civilian clothes, an important sequence which reveals to the audience not only her transition out of military life, but also her struggle with her artificial leg. Important but lasting far too long without suspense or other drama. Another lifeless scene is when Jenny collapses and “Oh, Happy Days,” plays ironically in the background for many minutes too long.

Other than these moments, the direction was skillful and sensitive, honoring the pain, celebrating survival, and finding the humor in a challenging situation. The performance tells a story we all need to consider in an engaging hour thirty-five minutes (without intermission.)

Note: This play runs at OSF in Ashland, Oregon through June 20.

Othello: The Pharma Interpretation

I'm way behind here. Let's see if I can catch up in the next couple of days.

First, the last bit about Othello. I ran across an intriguing theory about something that Shakespeare may have intended, and may have made sense to his first audience. We know that in addition to using old texts, Shakespeare was inspired by the latest news--the first forays of ships to America, for instance, and the science of his day. Which leads to something like a pharmacological component to Othello.

It depends in part on what kind of a Moor Othello is supposed to be. I tend to believe he's a northern African--I put more weight on the various mentions of Berbers and Barbary (real peoples and place) rather than the references to Othello being black--a relative term, since anybody not as white as a bleached Briton would be comparatively black, and the term is used metaphorically at times as well. (I even count as evidence Desdemona referring to her mother's maid "called Barbary" who sang the 'Willow' lament even as she died, which Desdemona then sings, and as Emilia does as she dies.)

The intriguing thesis is unfortunately buried in a dense feminist deconstructionist argument, but here's the gist: Othello's epilepsy may have been hereditary, and related to the fits of seers and prophets. A treatment for epilepsy was an Egyptian medicine, the kind derived from the gums of certain trees that Othello refers to in the play. And the special handkerchief that Othello reveres, as passed down to him by his father, was saturated with that medicine. Which is partly why it was so important to him.

This sense of Othello also relates to the "spells" which which Desdemona's father believed Othello charmed her. In any case, the themes of illness have fascinated a lot of scholars, who write about not only Othello but Iago, Casio and Desdemona. What interests me is what Shakespeare knew or believed, and what he knew his audience believed.

By the way, there's another production of Othello coming up this summer--starting June 3 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Hail

Bill Rauch's Romeo & Juliet at OSF

and Farewell!

Libby Appel's The Tempest at OSF

Hail and Farewell at OSF

The revels of Libby Appel’s 12th and final season as artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival are ending, and incoming artistic director Bill Rauch has been in residence to begin the transition. So the opportunity to see Appel’s last Shakespeare play (The Tempest) and Rauch’s first, at least as A.D. designate, (Romeo and Juliet) seems one of those gifts to journalistic cliché—the changing of the guard.

The younger Rauch arrives with a reputation for originality, so it’s not odd that his direction of Romeo and Juliet would be noted for its innovations, and some reviews of that temper led me to expect some radical dislocation that violates the text, as has become all too common elsewhere. But that’s not what I saw.

He does dress the elder Capulets and Montagues in Elizabethan costumes, while the younger wear prep school uniforms and carry Ipods. But that turned out to be a minor bit of flavoring, lending emphasis to a “generation gap” interpretation that basically updates the approach Franco Zeffirelli took in his 1968 film, and is even less radical than Baz Lurhmann’s 1996 film. Other major character interpretations seem familiar from W.H. Auden’s famous 1946 lectures.

Which is not to say Rauch didn’t do some daring and interesting things, such as the scenes in which Romeo and Juliet separately and passionately bemoan Romeo’s banishment. He plays them simultaneously, creating a powerful counterpoint. But it seemed to me that the greatest virtues of the production were more typical of OSF than different, especially that the whole play is performed. The early scenes that set up the politics of the feud, and Romeo’s infatuation with the unseen Rosaline that leads him to attend the party where he first meets Juliet, are all crucial to understanding the logic and the passions of this play, yet many productions reduce or drop them.

The performances are of the usual high quality, especially Dan Donohue as Mercutio, and Rauch seems to have quickly learned how to use the advantages and work around the disadvantages of the outdoor Elizabethan stage. It’s a venue that suggests to me the combination of a grand old London theatre and a small baseball stadium. Seeing Shakespeare surrounded by such a large audience (1,190 at full capacity) under the night sky provides unique moments, but the acoustic environment is less favorable to the human voice than the indoor Bowmer Theatre. Yet the huge playing area, which extends beyond, below and especially above the stage (to another two or three soaring levels) provide great opportunities—and perhaps demands—for spectacle.

The veteran Libby Appel really knows how to use that space in The Tempest, with acrobatic spirits dancing and dangling in space. (Deborah Dryden's costumes are also spectacular.) Appel sees Prospero as overcoming his hate and desire for vengeance, and liberating himself through forgiveness, guided by the luminous love of his daughter Miranda (Nell Geisslinger) and the empathetic magic of Ariel, played with such an unaffected contemporary style and yet with a timeless innocence by Nancy Rodriguez that she becomes the animating spirit of the production. Her desire for freedom evokes such sympathy that the theme of various enslavements emerges (emphasized for some of us that night because we saw several in this play’s cast in Gem of the Ocean just a few hours before).

The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last work as a playwright before he retired from the theatre, and now it is Libby Appel’s. As a parting gift she gave us a season to remember. Romeo and Juliet ends on October 5, The Tempest on October 6, but the plays indoors—including Gem of the Ocean, On the Razzle, Distracted and As You Like It continue to the end of that month. Plays that I didn't get a chance to see are Tracy's Tiger (Oct. 28), Tartuffe (Oct. 27) and The Taming of the Shrew (Oct. 7.) And never let it be forgot, this season's The Cherry Orchard, directed by Libby Appel.

This North Coast Weekend

Also reviewing the North Coast Repertory Company production of The Madwoman of Chaillot: Silas Knight at the T-S and Willi Welton in the E-R.

Jeff DeMark performs his baseball show, Hard as a Diamond, Soft as the Dirt, at Ferndale Rep this Saturday, Sept. 29, at 8 p.m. What? I'm actually going to be in town when he's doing a show? I'll be there!

If you're making plans for next weekend, the HSU production, HOMO EXPO: A Queer Extravaganza begins a two-weekend run on Thursday, Oct. 4 at 7:30 p.m. in Gist Theatre. More info here.

Also next weekend, Dell’Arte hosts the Brazilian ensemble Lume Teatro for a production called Sopro, in the Carlo Theatre, Oct. 4-7 at 8 p.m. Sanctuary Stage presents their 24-hour 10 Minute Play Fest at the Eureka Theatre on Oct. 5 at 7:30 p.m.

Gem of the Season

Greta Oglesby as Aunt Esther and G. Valmont
Thomas as Solly Two Kings in the OSF production
of Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson.